What's
the significance of this distanced narrative voice? Gertrude Fraser, in
her afterword to the 1993 edition of The Florida Negro, identifies
some of these dynamics within the text:

There
are other instances in The Florida Negro when the 'we' of the
text distances the author from the experiences of being Negro and
Floridian. Here the point of reference is the white reader, for whom
the author(s) is the chronicler and observer of Negro traditions and
communities. These instances operate by a different set of mechanisms
so that the reader (the white reader) is asked first to consider the
culture of the Negro as exotic, even odd, but then is made to normalize
those differences through a form of analogic substitution. (McDonogh
120-1)

The alternate
exoticizing and domesticating that Fraser identifies here in reference
to descriptions of folklore surfaces in local color treatments of jook
joints, both within this text and in others, as well. She argues that
the narrative voice tries to normalize difference through analogies; I
would argue that the light, playful tone accomplishes the same end in
the local color pieces.

Reading
The Florida Negro or Florida: A Guide to the Southernmost State,
there are moments where the identity of the narrative voice comes more
clearly into focus, when the tone slides into white turf, and there are
times when it seems more deracinated. That the identity of the narrative
voice should waver, or, similarly, that the effect in these texts could
vary so dramatically between exoticizing and domesticating, should not
surprise us. Gary McDonogh, the editor of The Florida Negro in
its belatedly published form, recognizes this crisis of position in the
authorial voice throughout the text; "at times, stereotypes are presented
in what seems to be an appeal to white readers of the period; at others,
a more critical voice is raised, even if a cogent argument for change
is scarcely voiced" (McDonogh xxvii). Given the conditions of race relations
and the ways black and white identity played off of each other in Florida
discourses, a schizophrenic tone was not unexpected in white
narratives about black public or private identity.

Have
you read up on the derivation of the word
"jook"? There are interesting etymological parallels to the public
reputation of jook joints.

If
you've already been there, the question at this point is how Marion Post
Wolcott's images did and did not participate
in the pattern of discursive representation of jooks that we've
just explored...

Links
that take you outside this discussion:

If
you're interested, you can examine some other
places this "schizophrenia" of narrative tone surfaces.